


BLACK SPIRES AND BEYOND

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-28
Updated: 2011-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Naiadestricolor on tumblr draws Connor and Feynriel. Very, very compellingly. The two meet in the Tevinter circle, since that's where they both end up. Just a short piece, trying to sort out writing them. <i>Feynriel knows what all the other mages dream about, beneath the black spires and beyond.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	BLACK SPIRES AND BEYOND

**Author's Note:**

> For Naiadestricolor, as ever.

Feynriel knows what all the other mages dream about, beneath the black spires and beyond. Old men nap in faded colors, and young men daydream brightly in the midst of lessons; sons and daughters doze beneath garden bowers, and lovers slip into blackness in each other’s arms.

Dreams are more demanding than the waking life they feed on.

His master says it’s better this way—to know what lurks in the hearts of his peers, and to curry their weaknesses better than he curries their favors.

But each night-walk is a hallway of unrelenting doors, more rooms than there are robes between the Hundred Pillars and Par Vollen. He avoids his own dreams the same way he avoids the rest, closing each door behind him, keyholes winking without end.

Despite the heavy guard he keeps, the night-watch he patrols better than any orange-scarfed city guardsman on the distant streets of Kirkwall, the other boys and girls never meet him eye to eye.

‘They see color of the Fade, and know that you’re with them,’ his master says, and, ‘Clever lad,’ though it feels more like foolishness and accident than anything, some other mark that makes him so special.

*

Letters from Hawke are few and far between. Still, some of the other apprentices get nothing from the couriers at all, or nothing more exciting than pale ink and paler parchment stained with a mother’s tears.

Feynriel reads Hawke’s words in the garden; he tries to smell the sun-cracked cobblestones in the vellum, or hear his mother’s voice in the secret messages, hidden between the bluff lines.

There’s a stain on one of the missives, which Hawke circled and called mabari slobber, but Feynriel wonders if it isn’t where his mother wept instead, the same way all mothers weep for their lost children.

It’s possible he thinks too much, too hard, and hears whispers in nothing more ample than hot Imperium breezes. Then, Connor Guerrin and his friends steal the letter, laughing as they chase each other from portico to portico, arcane shadows amongst the sun-baked columns and hidden in open spaces.

Feynriel turns red trying to catch them, hair falling loose out of its customary braid.

*

‘You should have lit him on fire,’ his master says, beside a bowl of incense and a well of ink, a little chest of curios and jewelry, holding earrings up to the mirror for a party that night. ‘You know his name, you find him in the Fade, you make him pay. Isn’t that right, Feynriel?’

‘Yes, ser,’ Feynriel replies, a relic from his homeland, that makes his master chuckle.

*

News of the trouble in Kirkwall travels through Minrathous with the same unconcerned pace as the lazy flies in the height of summer, back-ends glowing on and off in the dark, along the wending pathways of the private gardens, above the sand and stone. The magisters know what happened better than their apprentices and the archons know best of all, but the rumors take like tinder to dry kindling, and children gossip just the same as their elders, each meal as rife with conjecture as any late-night dinner party.

The mages of Kirkwall are quaint; they enact in miniature the lives the magisters lead every day, and call it revolution. Everyone talks about them like the dolls in a little house, like the shadows on the wall of a Sundermount cave.

Feynriel remembers the skittering of chitin, the chattering of mandibles, the furry brush of a giant spider-leg in the dark, against the scraped knuckles of his right hand—and even that was better than the shadow of the Gallows, falling as far as Lowtown, past the closed gate to the alienage.

*

Feynriel meets Connor after-hours, on his way past the marble fountain, at the end of a late night spent reading about the Dread Wolf instead of haunting dreams just like him. The spray in the air makes it seem chill, if only for a moment; Connor toys with something quick and green, little leaves blooming glossy against his palms, unfurling past his fingertips, and falling dead to the raked sand at his feet.

He’s not so big without his friends, but not so small alone, either. Feynriel tucks his braid behind one ear—no better remedy for being watched than watching.

‘You,’ Connor says.

‘You too,’ Feynriel replies.

Some small rock crunches beneath the sole of his boot, and Connor huffs, kicking a larger stone into the portico shadows.

‘You’re from Kirkwall, aren’t you?’ Connor asks. ‘…I read it. In the letters.’

‘How honest of you,’ Feynriel says.

Connor shrugs. ‘At least I know how to be.’

They measure each other the same way their masters taught them to, testing the potential for magic, every bluff and every swagger, an urge so primal even stray dogs do it—right before they piss all over each other in the street. When Feynriel thinks about it, he almost laughs, imagining high magister collars cinched tight below a drooling, brindled jowl, but Connor looks so serious he bites his lower lip to silence one more stupid instinct.

‘Bet you wish you were there right now,’ Connor says. ‘All the best things happen after you get sent away.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Feynriel replies. ‘I just love being hunted by angry templars.’

‘I wouldn’t know much about that,’ Connor admits. ‘I left Ferelden so I wouldn’t have to.’

‘Last I heard, _everyone_ was leaving Ferelden.’ Feynriel tugs at the end of his braid, thin fingers wound in the soft train of his hair—just like his mother’s, though it gets harder to recall the way hers smelled each day. ‘Something about a Blight and an Archdemon…’

‘ _All_ the best things,’ Connor repeats, shaking his head. He kicks another white stone with the toe of his leather boot, sending it deep into the garden. ‘The beast’s corpse was still warm when Mother had me packed up and shipped off to the Imperium. I didn’t even get to see the parade.’

 _Why are you telling me this,_ Feynriel wonders, but he knows the answer already. Some people deny their dreams, while others search for the right chance to share them.

There’s more than one way to get to know a man. Sometimes, he even wants you to know him—beyond meeting him unexpected in the haunts of the Fade, quiet as a shadow, or a demon, or a shade.

 **END**


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